


Misguided Ghosts

by vulpixgrrrl



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, F/F, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 20:49:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3263945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpixgrrrl/pseuds/vulpixgrrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Trigger Warnings: Panic, Implied Abuse</p>
    </blockquote>





	Misguided Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger Warnings: Panic, Implied Abuse

People say drowning is mostly painless. There’s some initial panic, your chest clenches, and as your lungs fill with fire and eventually give up, you will breathe in water. After a few breaths, you just fade into nothing. This was just like drowning, except it never faded into nothing. Her body had shut down into a panic, her chest was clenching up repetitively and her breath was so short when she tried to breathe it was near impossible. It made her light-headed and faint, and she had to grab on to the nearest stable piece of furniture she could find. Her entire body was shutting down, but it was no where near painless. The only thing she refrained from was tears.

 

_She wasn’t allowed to cry._

She stumbled through the massive metal door of her room, it was covered in beautiful, elaborate decorative engravings that were bended into the metal personally for her as a child. It seems so long ago now, the time when her life was perfect and nothing mattered except the excitement she felt about the firebending lesson she was going to be taught the following day. She shook the flash memory out of her head and slammed the door behind her, and it echoed in the large room. She looked over at her belongings that were set up and organized so perfectly.

 

_She wasn’t allowed to make a mess._

 

She reached her bed and clung to the edge, her soft fleece blanket gathered in her hands. The comfort the blanket gave her restored some of her peace of mind, but not enough. As the panic slowly dialled down, the adrenaline left her and the physical pain started to come back to her. She seized once, and winced at the sharp pains. Grabbing at her shirt, she ripped it off and saw the thick, red mark that covered her stomach and ribs. It was splattered with both deep reds and ice whites and she she could see the blistering bubbles starting to form. It was worse this time, and she could feel the sting seeping into her layers of skin. It’s deep. She drops to her knees and reaches under her bed desperately. She can feel the box she keeps hidden deep in the corner of her bed frame. She pulled it out and frantically opened it, and pulled out the tube of burn cream. Her heart sank when her hands felt how empty the tube was. _Shit_. She squeezed what she could into her hands, and the sad pea sized cream dabbed on to the end of her finger. Slowly, she spread what she could over the area that hurt the most. The cool sting was equally as refreshing as it was painful. For a few seconds, everything felt okay, and the entire world was gone. It all came back once she opened her eyes again to see the empty tube of cream, her burn that covered a little over half her stomach, and the dark room that surrounded her. That room now just makes her feel like she’s being suffocated. She fumbled the empty tube of cream and the excess around it smeared on her carpet and for an instant her heart stopped. But she remembered it doesn’t matter anymore.

 

_Nothing matters now._

Because in that time frame, she made a quick decision that would change her life. She’s going to run. She will leave this place, and never come back. She had no conscious or practical thoughts at this point. No ‘where is she going to go?’ or ‘how is she going to get away?’, just that she needed to.

 

Her hands rustled through her closet and threw on a tank top and grabbed a leather jacket she had always wished she had an occasion to wear it on. As she scampered to her desk, she temporarily forgot her injury and made a squeaking noise, grabbing her abdomen, and continued to limp over. She found some loose paper lying around, some ink, and turned to the paper unsure what to say. She scribbled “I’m sorry” and tucked it into a book on her bed. He would be able to find that.

 

With that, she pulled her hood over her head, wrapped her red scarf around her neck, and quietly snuck out of the building, undetected.

  


//

 

The shop has been quiet all evening, which means it probably will stay that way for the rest of the night as well. Laura kind of regrets promising her dad that she would stay up for the late shift and letting him off for the night, but she knows he deserves some time off with the amount he works. Her fingers tap up and down along a little puddle that formed when some hot water dripped on the counter a few hours ago, it had cooled since then and Laura was dabbing her fingers in it. The tips of her digits lightly touched the surface in sequence before she would pull them up, bringing small amount of the water with them. Her eyes were stuck in another world, and had stopped paying attention to the one around her. Seeing the water attach and fall from her hand repeatedly has her in a whole other world of her own fantasy.

_What would it be like to be a bender?_ She thinks about it every day, and always drifts off into this mind set of imagining herself being able to control an element with her own small hands. She would love to be a pro-bender, but her fantasy doesn’t even need to be as specific as that. Just doing something as simple as it being an easier method to heat the water in the tea shop and make her father’s life a hell of a lot easier as well. Everything would be easier for her, and everyone around her. Maybe she wouldn’t even be stuck working at home if she was a bender too.

Her mind was snapped out of it when the bell on the front door to the shop tinkled. Her body instinctively went into shop owner mode and straightened, smiling for the customer. But she relaxed again when she saw LaFontaine standing there.

“Hey, Laura!” LaF approached the counter were Laura stood, “I was just heading home from the after-party of the match earlier. The Zetas were being total snobs the whole time, it was exhausting,” they made a little chuckle at their own comment and looked back at Laura. “How’s the shop tonight?” they asked.

“It’s alright, no customers at all for hours so I’m extra bored,” Laura sighed and went back to dabbing her fingers in the water in front of her. LaF looked at her and her movements for a moment and put their hand on hers.

“Hey, don’t be stuck in your own thoughts too long, I know what that does to you,” LaF looked her straight in the eyes and Laura could see the sympathy and softness in them. It was then that Laura noticed the cuffs of LaFontaine’s pants and shoes were soaking wet.

“You’re soaked! Is it raining or something?!” Laura rushed to get them a towel to dry themselves with, and put a kettle of hot water on the stove right away. LaFontaine used the towel to get the worst of the water from around her legs dried up.

“Duh, can you not see the pouring weather outside your own window? Or were you that caught up in your own thoughts again?” It was a sarcastic question, because they knew it was the latter in Laura’s case. Laura just gave them a scrunched up face in response and they both chuckled a bit at that. “Yeah, I just made a makeshift umbrella out of some metal I found, but that sure didn’t protect my legs,” LaF continued to dry themselves as best they could while Laura had started to scamper around behind the counter, getting a cup of tea ready for her friends journey home. The tea was all poured in a nice cup with a hot sleeve and handed it over to LaFontaine.

“Aren’t you always equipped with gear for every situation?” she absentmindedly asked them while she took the towel back and put it in a hamper.

“Not on duty tonight Laura, you know that,” Of course Laura knew that, but sometimes she liked to remind herself of LaFontaine’s position of power. It makes her proud but also extremely jealous. Laura can’t even imagine what it would be like to be on the Republic City police force. She snapped back out of it and smiled at LaF, who was on their way out of the shop.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then Laura! Hope your night doesn’t stay quite so boring!” Laura smirked at her friend.

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

 

//

 

She hadn’t planned on the rain. It soaked her through to the bone and caused her full body to become freezing. She would have firebended a bit to warm herself up but for one, it’s raining so hard it wouldn’t stay lit, and for two, it doesn’t do well when she is trying to pull as little attention to herself as possible.

Her feet had just ran for as long as they could, taking her wherever they could and not paying attention to where that actually was. Until she couldn’t run, until her feet couldn’t keep up with the slow decline in her health. The burn on her side was giving her intense pains that she felt like just collapsing in the road and never getting up again. The other problem was, her feet brought her somewhere unknown to her. She hardly ever left her mother’s mansion, let alone go anywhere other than the main streets. This place was foreign, and not what she was used to. There was small, run-down looking homes and stores lining the dark walls of the city. It was grimy and dirty, broken walls and broken homes. She wasn’t sure if it was a normal neighbourhood, or she just never knew anything different than her own way of living. It scared her, to think that the whole world was not what she thought. Sure, she knew she lived a little more wealthy lifestyle than most, but how wrong she might be about just ‘a little more’.

The best part of the rain though, she couldn’t tell if she was crying. Sure, her hair was matted and it hung weakly down to her stomach, curls falling out from the wetness. But once she left the grounds of mansion, she lost track of if the wetness that covered her face was the downpour of the sky, or her pain and hurt catching up to her. At this point, she didn’t care.

Clutching her abdomen, she trudged down the sidewalk of the street she was on. She finally took a good look at her surroundings and saw small little shops and restaurants, some with their lights on, some without. But the ones that had warm dims coming out of them looked like they were closing for the night, and she wasn’t surprised. She had the urge to go in one of them and ask for help, because the reality of running away finally set in. But she also kept telling herself not to do it. _Don’t make yourself known._ So for a while longer, she limped along the street biting back the pain and cold for as long as she could.

Then something threw her off. A billboard. She looked up at it both in shock, and in relief. It was a giant poster with _her_ name on it. Well, her surname. ‘Karnstein Group’ was written in large letters and beautiful colours of all four elements. She recognized the design, she had seen it when her mother had issued it for her campaign this season. She had even seen the poster in public before, on the main street on her way to the pro-bending arena, but something about this one was different. Someone had painted graffiti across it saying, ‘evil bitch’. The part of her in shock comes from that, in her entire life, she had never once heard anyone speak a bad word against her mother. Everyone was either too deep in her pockets and colleagues that they genuinely did like her. And everyone else was just too scared to ever talk against her. But then again, she remembers, the world is probably much different than she thought.

The part of her that feels relief, a tiny pea sized ball of emotion in the back of her already crowded mind, is happy that she isn’t alone. She would never go so far as to call her an ‘evil bitch’, not in such language at least. But she always felt some hatred for her mother, and she always assumed everyone admired and loved her. She smirked and looked back at the street in front of her.

That’s when she saw her chance. A small tea shop with a nice warm light coming from it ahead of her, a girl outside bringing a sign inside, obviously closing up. Again, she instinct kicked in to just go for it, but she started talking herself down to keep going alone. But instinct started to take over, her burn was started to inflame and it was making her head spin so much she was getting more lightheaded again. The rain suddenly felt like a weight pulling her down even more, and that’s when she went for it. She sprinted over to the shop at top speed, of what she could manage of course. She made it to the curb in front, splashing her way over, before the small girl in a cute little apron looked up at her, very surprised. She wanted to say something, explain herself, make up a story, but from running over she had spent her last stamina and energy. The girl just looked her right in the eyes, concerned obviously with how she looked. Her head pounded and her vision blurred, the pain in her side seemed to consume her entire body, but before it did she mustered the only sound she could.

“Hh- help,” before the burn and blackness took over her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue was written by Bailey [vulpixgrrrl.tumblr.com], track tags #avau


End file.
